Dark Habits Dark Habits

Almodóvar's third feature is a kitsch, colourful and enjoyably bitchy delight that showcases his masterful direction of and adoration for his female stars; Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes,  and Cecilia Roth all feature.

Blighted by drugs and amour fou, nightclub singer Yolanda (Cristina Sanchez Pascual) has herself committed to a charity convent. The nuns there include a writer of sensationalist pulp fiction, a drug addict and a masochist. But their private lives and perverse foibles are plunged into doubt when a new mother superior arrives to take charge.

An unbridled visual delight, the parodic Dark Habits offers a powerful denigration of the Catholic Church, a recurring motif in the director's later work.